Gretchen and the Pickpockets, Gretchen and the Pickpockets (self-released)

Local to Durham, this awesome band does most things right and just a couple of minor things wrong. Plenty of good stuff to say, so you know what’s next. “Break a Sweat” was a bad choice to go first in the tracklist, as it paints these very capable peeps as nothing more than a wedding band your friends would recommend; with its microwaved blues/amen beat, it’s stock fedora-hat footage and boasts the worst engineering of Gretchen Klempa’s voice (please lose the fade-glissando inflections, girl) out of the 10 songs. Things get weirdly righteous from there, though. “No Good” begins as staple torchy blooz, but from out of nowhere they whip out a spazzy faux-jazz trumpet break, a great knuckleball. “Down Down Down” goes hilariously acid-rock, its intro a freak-guitar-noise snippet that’d make Sunn(((O))) proud, and then the whole freaking album gets stoned and goes Zeppelin, with Klempa aiming for the back row of American Idol and happily blowing doors. Quite impressed overall — I assumed they were old 1970s kids until I saw their cube-hipster Facebook shots. Nice. A — Eric W. Saeger